Fight Poverty: Action + Attitude

Today is blog action day and the theme is poverty, and I’ve been struggling for weeks to find a subject to write on and following discussions today, I realized many other people are in the same boat.

I did wrote yesterday a post saying that poverty isn’t off-topic in any blog niche, and I certainly believe that’s true. Why is, then, so hard to write about it?

Maybe my good friend Jen said it best when she says that any post that comes to mind seems to carry a bit of hypocrisy, and certainly Chris Garret has a point when he says “good intentions are not good without actions”.

According to blog action day stats, Today 12,044 sites have blogged about poverty and hopefully, risen awareness about poverty, but, I’ll join Sue Clark on saying: Just blogging about poverty is not enough.

Awareness about poverty is high enough, what is lacking is attitude and not information. If 12,044 posts have today lead to 12,044 actual actions to fight poverty, then I’ll call it success, but if a good part of these posts are just transferring the responsibility to the reader, then is time wasted.

What can you do?

Actions fall in two categories: long time strategies, and short time solutions. Ideally, actions that fall in the first category will help wipe poverty from the face of the earth, but the short time solutions are essential to supply the immediate needs of people, literally, starving to death or being unable to supply very basic needs.

Short time solutions

• Donate money to an organization
• Engage in activities to raise funds or help manage one
• Donate what you don’t want, instead of selling on eBay
• Donate your professional skills to help find and optimize solutions

You don’t have to cross the world to find people in the need of help. Living in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, London, I tell you there is plenty to do here. I’m sure there’s plenty to do near you as well. If there isn’t, you can always engage online.

Long time strategies

• Educate both rich and poor
• Help create sustainable solutions in terms of cost of solutions/revenue
• Help change the greed mentality

The greed mentality and the credit crunch explained

Nothing is more harmful to the delicate balance of the human beings than trying to have plenty of limited resources. There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, and is more than enough to all of us.

More often than not people seem to want to be really rich. And what’s that for? The only reasonable answer I see for willing to be rich is to have more stability over life, which is a fair point. Still, it’s a fragile thought.

People believe to think they are as wealthy as they money they have. But money is just an abstraction and, as Christian Heillmann pointed it quite accurately, these days is an abstraction to no real world goods, merely speculation, then, bam, credit crunch! Where has the wealth gone? Nowhere, it has never been there.

But I’m slightly digressing now, the point is, greed is making some people rich and, as consequence, others poor. Make Greed history and you’ll make poverty history. And if you don’t have poverty, why would you bother in being rich to live with stability?

Easier said than done, I hear some saying. I’m not sure, it seems that becoming poor and broken is even easier than fulfilling the objective, while trying to become rich.

Finally, is not about you or me being rich or trying to, but where you shop and what. Is about who you endorse with your money. As my cousin Saverio told me once: You don’t make politics voting, you make politics buying. Chose carefully where and what to buy!